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Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
Summary Cognitive Surplus is a non-fiction book written by author and academic Clay Shirky. "Cognitive Surplus" refers to our mental awareness of the abundance of free time we have in the current age, and how we use it. Industrialization transformed society, resulting in what much of what people struggled to obtain in the past being provided with ease. With the free time left over, our focus could either go to fulfilling other needs or to enjoying that free time. "Life in the developed world includes a lot of passive participation, at work we're office drones, at home we're couch potatoes. The pattern is easy enough to explain by assuming we've wanted to be passive participants more than we wanted other things" (pg 11). The opening chapters discuss the level with which television began to fill people's free time after the industrial revolution. Quotes "One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time" Pg. 10 "As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible" Pg. 10 "...the use of a social technology is much less determined by the tool itself; when we use a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another" Pg. 14 "We, collectively, aren't just the source of the surplus; we are also the people designing its use, by our participation and by the things we expect of one another as we wrestle together with our new connectedness" Pg. 29 "Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change."p. 49 "The word media itself is a bundle, referring at once to process, product, and output." P. 53 "People pay more for beer in a bar than they do at home because it is a more convivial place to have a drink" Pg. 58 "Sending messages to the public wasn't for the public to do, and, lacking the ability to easily connect with one another, our motivation to create was subdued."Pg. 61 "Receiving sufficient payment can make otherwise undesirable activity desirable and worthwhile." Pg. 72 "Broadcast media, like television, clearly filled some human needs, but those needs that they couldn't fill well became harder to see and, ultimately, harder to imagine." Pg. 88 "Those bits of new behavior are extensions of, rather than replacements for, much older patterns of our lives as social creatures" Pg. 101 "When negative consequences are imposed on a behavior, they will produce a reduction of that particular response" Pg. 113 Our theory-induced blindness around Hunan motivation can keep us from reexamining beliefs about why people behave as they do." Pg. 120 "Our theory-induced blindness around Hunan motivation can keep us from reexamining beliefs about why people behave as they do." Pg. 120 "Generations do differ, but less because people, but less because people differ than because opportunities do." Pg.121 "Culture isn't just an agglomeration of individual behaviors; it is a collectively held set of norms and behaviours within a group." Pg. 134 "Social production is not a panacea; it is just an alternative." Pg. 129 "Knowledge is the most combinable thing we humans have, but taking advantage of it requires special conditions."Pg. 140 "Anything that lowers the cost of transmitting knowledge can increase the pool of knowers." Pg. 140 Community of Practice - people who come together to share their knowledge as a way of getting better at what they do. og 143 "The first great wave of modern globalization was driven in part by the telegraphs lowering of the cost of sharing information. Today the internet is lowering the cost of transmitting no only words but also images, video, voice, raw data, and everything else that can be digitized, a chang in cost on par with that of the telegraph and the printing press. Pg. 141 "What is clear is that the simple application of seemingly fundamental principles isn't actually simple, because principles aren't actually fundamental" Pg. 149 "Couch surfing was set up to change the way people travel. It isn't just about having the free accommodation, but also about making connections worldwide" Pg. 159 " All worlds, past, present and future, have constraints; throwing of the old ones just creates a space for new ones to emerge" Pg. 162 "Any Group trying to create real value must police itself to ensure it isn't losing sight of it's higher purpose". Pg. 165 "Communal Value is produced when a group of people are conversing or collaborating with one another"- 174 "The world is becoming well provisioned with sources of personal and communal value, value mainly created and captured by the participants." Pg. 185 Critical Concepts and Ideas by Shirky * One of the underlying themes present in the first chapter was television, and how our television viewing experience has changed since the internet has become popular. * Another theme present is the communal "cognitive surplus," which is the vast amount of time avaliable that could be put to other uses. * The notion of a sophisticated work group, Shirky explains, "members work together to keep themselves and one another from sliding into satisfying but ineffective emotions, and when they get side tracked they return the group back to their sophisticated goal." * According to Shirky in chapter 6, civic value derived from online participation via social media platforms is often rare. Because of it's intrinsic nature of improving society, platforms like ushahidi are becoming more scare because of the need for people to congregate and organize. Shirkey in Relation to Our World Today * Television shows are now including hash-tags in the corner of the screen for viewers to live-tweet as they watch. By adding that feature, networks are basically getting free promotion for their show by using fans as marketing. By shifting from just being a viewer to also being a marketing tool, how has this changed our overall television experience? "Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when in fact it was a reaction to the real problem - dramatic social change and the inability of older civic models to adapt" (pg 3). * What are some examples of our society trying to solve the reaction to a problem, as opposed to finding the source problem itself? For example, drug and alcohol dependency, discrimination, etc. *Adjusting to modern day technology and norms is not anything easy as Clay Shirky suggests in chapter 6. In fact, the transition from traditional mind to a modern one is covered over a series of phases one of the biggest one is acknowledging and accepting the vital role social media plays in enabling new ways of collaborating. *In previous decades, when social media did not a play a key role in societal collaboration. Groups for the most part were smaller, more expensive to maintain, and overall were not efficient in creating long term-large scale value as we seen in modern day “support groups” that live online. *The concept of individuals using their free time collaboratively to achieve goals is something that is highlighted by Shirky. What experiences do you have using your computer to aid in an overall goal, or problem? Folding@Home is an excellent example of this to help determine how proteins unfold. Lingering Questions from Class What effect has the aggregate of free time across the world had on the distribution of information? Our society increasingly offers more free time because of advances in technology. One example is in the consumption of television shows. How many hours a week do you spend consuming television shows from when you were 10 to now? Regarding group 2's class discussion, would you really be able to survive with only using one Internet site? In Cognitive Surplus, Shirky notes " Are groups of people best thought of as aggregations of individuals or as cohesive unit?" Here's one idea, Pyscologist Wilfrid Bion who studyed this phenamenon of group behavior argues that " we are, as a species hopelessly comitted to both indivudality and group work. Humans are fundementally indivudal, but we are also fundamentally social". In regards to chapter 6, how has groups; more specefically team work influenced your ability to assess situations requiring outside knowledge? Shirky sgguests it's in our nature to network with others to become better equipped with general knwoledge. But also, as humans our indivudal agency promotes a sense of soldem in comtrast to community. How has your online experience been influenced by different networks present in today popular social media plattforms? In Conclusion